pap

Or how quickly can the Japanese lad learn the thirty or so cliches that make up the bulk of his vocabulary? /ducks

I hear over the grapevine that it's nailed on for October.

This is why I'm not that bothered about yesterday's result :- C**ts 3 - 0 Football

Online gambling out of hand?

I'd be interested to know whether Rickie would like to go to Newcastle. Liverpool and Newcastle have a lot of mutual respect for each other. Very unlikely that his family would have received the same 'welcome' oop north.

Just seen the highlights on Saints Player, with particular focus on the Lambert incident. Happened real fast, Adam El-Abd went down like Lambert threw acid in his face. Onwards and upwards. We won't play cheating shytes like Brighton every week. Gus Poyet has not yet been cloned, as far as I'm aware.

Or a slave who thinks he's a master, irrationally defending his masters

I am well aware of China's efforts in Africa, dune. However, although the likes of the East India Company were a precursor to Queen Vic eventually being named Empress of India, I'm not sure that China can politically get away with saying that an African country belongs to them. Appreciate that the distinction might not be there. As for your continuing calls for me to open my eyes, you still haven't told us how the UK is going to use capitalism to get out of its capitalist crisis. Don't worry though, I'm not really expecting an answer. Trick question. There is no way out.

Precisely. China is the king of capitalism. There is no way within the current system to out-compete them, and they own a large part of the West's debts. I don't think China will go for colonialism at all. The time will come when they'd like their money back. It'll be interesting to see what happens then. Human nature is very much determined by the environment in which that human grows up. I don't accept the Western fallacy that we're all a bunch of c**ts who'd step on our own grandmothers to get one rung further up the ladder. Change the environment, and you change human nature.

Too late, in my view. I'm not sure what changes you could bring about in the existing framework that could help. Problem is, there are a lot of people who are very happy with how things are right now. Which is all nice in theory, but would unilateral legislation be enough to deal with multinationals? If anything, the complete reverse is true. Countries are bending over backwards for large business. If, as you suggest, a nation state introduces more regulation, these firms will just go to places where there is less regulation. You should really check out that Zeitgeist : Moving Forward vid I posted.

Sigh. Where do we start? In what way is China communist today?

dune, Andy:- Apologies for the delay in reply. One of my New Years resolutions was spending less time on here during the day. I'm amazed that you can both point to capitalism as a system that 'works'. It doesn't address human needs. It is built on the premise that growth is unlimited, and that cyclical consumption is the only way to keep it going. It also works under the assumption that market forces are "fair". I doubt that has ever been true. The reality is that capitalism is anything but egalitarian. Corporations swallow smaller players, high-earners pay accountants to avoid tax - yet at the same time we've got people in Africa dying of disease because they have no access to clean water, because it's too expensive. Pharmaceutical companies knowingly restrict access to live saving treatments because it'll hurt their bottom line. You only have to look at the fuss that was created when South Africa decided they were going to make their own AIDS drugs. If capitalism works so well, perhaps you'd both like to comment on how it's going to extricate Britain out of its current mess. Or any of the Western democracies with money problems ( pretty much all of it at this point )?

...created by global capitalism. ...which are all made in the Far East because of global capitalism. Not only that, but all the jobs around them (supply chain, ra ra ra) are there too. Nice as it is to benefit from your invaluable guide to buying new (old?!) furniture, you're dodging the point. The very system you're upholding is fecked. Capitalism doesn't work, has never worked and can never work. Used to be the case that we could turn a blind-eye to capitalism's casualties. Now, with us on the sick list, I'm not so sure.

I think you've missed the point, which was that left-wing doesn't necessarily equal nice guy. Anyway, since you have provided more food for thought, allow me to reciprocate. Capitalism is a failed philosophy. It has never worked globally. Might have looked good from the perspective of this sceptred isle for a long time, but the wheels are coming off here too. Your commitment to low tax is commendable, but it only really works if you have a high volume of people in employment. Years ago, we might have been able to export our way out of trouble. However, that brilliant system we call capitalism gravitates toward lowest cost, meaning that effectively, those jobs are staying in the Far East.

I think you were born before your time, dune. You would have had a field day with Stalin.

I think it needs raw meat and nonsense to start its booting up cycle.

I got to play a lot (i.e. too much) of this over the Christmas holidays. Have some extended thoughts on this now. My main character is a level 35 Jedi Guardian, specced to tank ( the boy who gets the **** beaten out of him on purpose so his team-mates don't have to, non-MMO people ) although I have a Sith character on the same server. Once again, cannot stress how much I am enjoying the story. This, more than anything, is what is driving me onward through the game - which is in stark contrast to other MMOs where unless you are a complete lore nerd, you're doing what you do to hit a new level, and eventually the level cap. The companions are awesome. Not only do they add a lot of story to the game, but they also allow you to do things that just weren't easily do-able outside of a group before. Take tanking, for example. In most other MMOs, the only time you get to practice tanking is when you're actually in a group. No WoW tank class has a companion, yet in SWTOR, you nearly always have a companion ready so you always have something to protect. There's other stuff that has been done very well too. It's probably the best inventory I've seen in an MMO. They have a separate tab for "mission items", meaning that anything you need to pick up as part of a quest doesn't take up part of your main inventory space. Also, if you're miles from anywhere and have a bag full of crap, you can get your companion to bugger off to the shops and sell all the crap stuff. Takes 1 minute to do so, but is far better than having to get all the way back to a major city. A lot of the good stuff that you might be used to in WoW just isn't in this game yet. It desperately needs a dungeon finder, for example. However, there are loads of people playing this atm, so it isn't that hard to posse up. One thing I would say - be very wary about the guild you join. Some nob in my (former) guild decided it would be fun to reveal massive spoilers about the Consular questline in guild chat. I really wasn't happy about that. Without doubt though, my game of last year (and probably the next few years too).

They were known as Garies up here Very weird seeing that term come to life. Scousers using cockney rhyming slang RIP Gary - far far too young.

Nice try on the old Liverpool thing mate. I was born in Southampton and spent the first 19 years of my life there. Still, it was worth a go. Why not log in as Turkish now and add some weight to your opinion?

Bwa-ha-ha. Dune's fragile grasp on politics is finally highlighted. Broken down, Dune sees politics like this. Labour are the supposed good guys. Tories are the bad guys. Dune being dune, he has lined up behind the "bad guys". Moreover, he uses any deviation of the "good guys" from the true path of altruism as being proof that all their ideas are borken. It makes PERFECT logical sense*. * to a Commodore 64 that has just been hit by a meteorite.

Really enjoyed that TDD

How much is the true cost per mile supposed to be? How did they determine it?

I still believe that the film Gremlins has made the best cinematic use of the microwave.

It's a shame, but the Football League show was never a standalone thing for me - always supplemented it with Saints Player. It's a much better experience this year, on account of them putting the Championship first, but they cover a lot of games in a very short time period. It has always been a bit crap though.

I'm really not surprised by this. The attitudes some southerners have towards Liverpudlians (and to a certain extent, northerners in general) is bloody disgusting. My missus, who genuinely is one of the nicest people you would ever meet (she would have to be to put up with me), was routinely treated as a potential thief whenever she opened her mouth in shops. I'm not tarring everyone with the same brush, but it happens a lot more than it should.